Synchronous module loading in ES6

Mar 29th, 2012

One of the great features of ES6 modules is the direct style module loading syntax:

1
2

importmapfrom"underscore.js";...map(a,f)...

This makes it as frictionless as possible to grow or refactor your code into multiple modules, and to pull third-party modules into an existing codebase. It also makes a common module format that can be shared between the browser and JS servers like Node.

But this direct style requires loading its dependencies before it can execute. That is, it’s a synchronous module load. Put in the context of a script tag, this would make it all too easy to block page rendering on I/O:

Throwing this syntax into the browser like this would be an invitation to jank. Thanks to insight from Luke Hoban, I think we have the right approach to this for ES6, which is in fact similar to our approach to avoiding turning eval into a synchronous I/O operation.

In previous versions of ECMAScript, there’s only one syntactic category of program that you can evaluate, called Program in the grammar. In ES6, we’ll define a restricted version of the syntax to be used in synchronous settings, which makes it illegal to do synchronous loads. Within a blocking script, the only access to modules is via the dynamic loading API:

This eliminates the footgun, and all of your modules can themselves use the synchronous loading syntax. For example, if jquery.js wants to use a module — say, a data structure library — it can go ahead and load it synchronously:

1
2
3

// jquery.jsimportStackfrom"utils.js";...newStack()...

But still, this restriction on the top-level loses the convenience of directly importing modules from scripts. Thing is, in an asynchronous context, there’s nothing wrong with doing a synchronous load. So just like the asynchronously loaded jquery.js can use the synchronous syntax, we can also allow it in a defer or async script:

This allows the full flexibility and expressiveness of ES6 embedded in HTML, without any hazard of blocking page rendering for I/O.

The eval function for ES6 will work the same way, disallowing synchronous loading syntax in the grammar it recognizes, to prevent turning it into a synchronous API. We’ll also add an asynchronous version of eval that, like script async, recognizes the full grammar.